Congratulations on deciding to launch a "food blog". We'd encourage you to think of yourself more as a publisher in the food industry. What you're building is almost exactly like a magazine: content and recipes that readers look for
Note: as of 2020, almost the entire site is built using updated, modern features from the Feast Plugin. The theme is only there to provide base styling.
Not covered
Before starting, you'll need:
- A domain
- Hosting (with a quality host)
- Basic WordPress configuration (permalinks, etc)
- Basic website knowledge
Theme
Step #1 is to purchase the Feast Plugin, which includes access to all our themes.
As of 2021, the entire website is built with features from the plugin. The theme only provides base styling, but is still required.
Upload the theme
Upload the plugin
Install Yoast
Configure it following our SEO for food bloggers guide
Create placeholder content
It's simpler to visually see what you're doing when you have some posts to populate your pages.
Create 10 posts and assign them featured images. You'll delete this when you have real content.
Done
The setup is done. Everything below is general information you should know for running a food blog, but not related to your theme or plugin.
Education
You're going to spend the rest of your life learning, and re-learning, how to run a content site.
We highly recommend signing up for Food Blogger Pro (unrelated to us), as they cover almost every aspect of running a food blog.
Recipe card plugin
A recipe card plugin is necessary to generate recipe schema that Google uses in certain search results. There are 3 acceptable options:
Contact the plugin developer for install instructions for whichever plugin you choose.
Images
The two important image sizes to remember are:
- 1200x1200 for featured images
- 1200 wide for in-post images (height doesn't matter)
You'll need to perform pre-upload and post-upload optimization. See this image optimization guide.
Timeframe
Your focus for the first 12 months should be creating unique, high quality content. A single high quality recipe is worth more than 100 low quality ones.
See: how to launch your food blog
You should publish at minimum 1 post per week for the first year.
Social sharing
Your two options for social sharing are:
Read up more on this at Food Blogger Pro.
Customizing
If you're just getting started, don't waste time trying to customize your site.
The colors and layout of the website are built a certain way to comply with SEO, accessibility, pagespeed. See: what am I paying for.
Instead, we recommend leaving things in place with our defaults built around best practices, and once you can afford $5000 for a custom design, go work with a designer who will guide you through the process and make sure you're not breaking your site.
If you can't justify paying someone to make the change because it won't have a measurable impact on your users and revenue, then you shouldn't do it. See: why am I making this change?
Readers are there for your content, not the site design.
If you're a technical user and want to make customizations, check out this post on types of customizations and ensure:
- All CSS changes are done in "Additional CSS"
- All functionality/coding changes are done in the code snippets plugin
We do not offer support for customizations - you're entirely on your own for developing, tweaking, and maintaining them.
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